


pulling strings

by aibari



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Character Study, Gen, Pre-Season/Series 01, Time Travel, fix-it??, season 5 jon travels through time to fix things but it's a bit different this time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:49:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25802401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aibari/pseuds/aibari
Summary: If you know what strings to pull, you can make anyone do anything.Annabelle knows as much.University student and psych study participant Annabelle Cane goes to a café and meets a man who seems to know a bit too much about her.
Relationships: Annabelle Cane & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 12
Kudos: 116





	pulling strings

If you know what strings to pull, you can make anyone do anything.

Annabelle knows as much.

She has a lot of experience pulling strings. Knows when to use her softest, kindest tone, knows how to gently imply that perhaps - perhaps someone else said something horrible about you. Perhaps they think it, every time they look at you, and isn’t that terrible? And shouldn’t you do something about it? She says these things and other things, plants them like seeds and waters them until they bloom into action, with such genuine concern or sincerity or logic that no-one could accuse her of being anything but a caring friend, a concerned bystander.

It’s an art. It’s -

Annabelle draws a shaky breath.

She takes a sip of tea. It’s gone cold, the liquid dark and bitter from oversteeping. It lies like a film in her mouth, coating her tongue with grime and tannins.

Around her, the café is full of people talking, enjoying the friday afternoon.

There is an old-fashioned clock hanging over the door. Annabelle glances at the time.

If you know what strings to pull, you can make anyone do anything.

It’s like conditioning. Like John B. Watson’s Little Albert. Like rats and emotional reinforcement.

Perhaps that’s why she finds this entire arachnophobia thing so frustrating. If she can get people to do what she wants - most of the time, if not always - then why -

Why can’t she control this?

“Is this seat taken?”

She looks up.

A man stands over her. He is tall, and he is wearing a long, dark coat that looks too warm for the weather. A scar runs like a rope across his throat. Scars dot the side of his face, too, tiny round things like cigarette burns or constellations of unfamiliar stars.

His face is unreadable.

“Feel free,” says Anabelle. She gives him a bland smile.

The man snorts like he’s in on the joke, a quiet, almost there thing. He places a paper cup of steaming liquid on the table, and then sits down heavily on the chair in front of her.

Annabelle stares down into her own cup, and tries to keep her hands from shaking.

Her father was developing a tremor in his hands, the final time she saw him, before she cut contact. It was just a thing that happened to people sometimes, a neurological condition that crept up on you and then outstayed its welcome. Annabelle had looked at her father, at his hand shaking around a glass of water, and thought about inevitability.

“What’s your, ah, what’s your name,” the man across from her says, voice going up at the end. Not like a question, exactly.

Almost like a confrontation. One he’s afraid to have, maybe.

“That’s not really any of your business, is it?” Annabelle says, and then, not quite sure why she is saying it: “It’s Annabelle.”

“Hello, Annabelle,” the man says. “I’m Jon.”

“And why are you talking to random girls at cafés, Jon?”

There is something wrong with his eyes, she realises with a start. They look too deep, somehow, like bottomless wells. Too … hungry.

Too _sad._

“How do you feel about spiders?” Jon asks.

“I’m sorry?” Annabelle says. Her eyes flit to the clock above the door without her permission.

He can’t know.

He _can’t_ , but it still feels like she has given herself away.

“Spiders,” Jon says, with a calm that isn’t calm. He takes a sip of tea, takes his time like he’s weighing out the words. “I admit I’m terrified of them myself.”

“I have an appointment,” Annabelle says. “I should go.”

It’s true. She does have an appointment, meeting with Doctor Elizabeth Bates at the labs for the second time, though she doesn’t technically need to leave for another thirty minutes.

“You shouldn’t,” Jon says. He leans forward in his seat. It doesn’t look like he notices that he’s moved, too caught up in the emotion that has propelled him forward, by the need to make her understand - something. “It’s - trust me.”

“How would you know?” Annabelle asks, waspish, but it is getting uncomfortably clear that he does know something, somehow. “Have you been following me around?”

She shifts in her seat. Feels a little sick with the loss of equilibrium.

“More like the other way around,” Jon says under his breath, like he is making a joke. Like Annabelle has ever done anything to him.

She bristles. “Excuse me?”

“Ah,” Jon says. He looks embarrassed, suddenly. “Sorry. This is … complicated.”

“Well, maybe you should uncomplicate it or leave, then.”

Jon takes another long sip of tea.

She watches him, half holding her breath.

“When you were a child,” he says, finally, like he is telling her a story, “you ran away from home because you wanted to be seen. And something did see you that day, though it was the wrong thing, and it marked you, and now it wants you for its own.”

“I,” Annabelle says, but that’s the extent of what she can get out. She thinks of an old, abandoned chip shop and its monster, weaving.

Jon’s mouth quirks sympathetically. “It’s very poetic, I suppose. The weaver of fate.”

“Marked me for what, exactly?” Annabelle asks.

“The end of the world,” Jon says. He pauses, makes a little face. “Well. That’s quite far off at the moment, but that’s the goal.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Annabelle says.

She should really just leave.

_The end of the world_. That isn’t -

Fear sits like a lump of ice in her gut.

She shouldn’t trust this man. She should leave.

She stays where she is.

“I thought so, too,” Jon says. “And then the world, ah, ended.”

“So you’re telling me you’re from some kind of … doomed timeline?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“But then,” Annabelle says, not quite able to finish that sentence yet.

“You have spent a long time telling me that free will doesn’t exist,” Jon says. “And that this path is inevitable. But there are so many choices that lead to it that were based on a lack of information.”

He pauses meaningfully, with a flair that is almost theatrical. Annabelle finds herself unable to speak, unable to stop listening even as the silence spreads out so completely between them that she can hear her own heartbeat.

“You can do what you like, after this,” Jon says. “It’s your choice. But before you do, I would like to give you the information you need to make that choice an _informed_ one.”

She takes another sip of tea to steady herself.

If you know what strings to pull, you can make anyone do anything.

She knows as much.

Jon seems to know it, too.

Here he is, pulling at hers.

But -

“All right,” she says, tannins bitter on her tongue. “I’ll listen.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still not sure how to write Annabelle, but this has been a fun start to trying to figure her out.


End file.
